The For-itself retroactively constitutes the past from which it appears born
Evidence
Thus in a sense the For-itself appears as being born from the world, for the In-itself from which it is born is in the midst of the world, as a copresent past among co-present pasts; into the world and in terms of the world a For-itself arises which did not exist before and which has been born. But in another sense it is the For-itself which causes the existence of a before in general and the existence in this before of co-presents united in the unity of one past world and such that one can designate one or the other among them as this object. There is not first one universal time where a For-itself suddenly appears not yet having a Past. Rather it is in terms of birth as the original and a priori law of being for the For-itself that there is revealed a world with a universal time in which we can designate a moment when the For-itself was not yet and a moment when it appeared, beings from which the For-itself was not born and a being from which it was born. Birth is the upsurge of the absolute relation of Pastness as the ekstatic being of the For-itself in the In-itself. Through birth a Past appears in the world. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 479
Categorization
- DEFINE: Clarifies the two-directional causation of birth: the For-itself is both born from the world and constitutes the ‘before’ that the world’s past presupposes.
- XREF: Directly relevant to Beauvoir’s account of how womanhood is at once given facticity and a situation consciousness transcends. — connects to: The past’s fixed in-itself character requires the for-itself to identify with itself — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 427; The past is a for-itself that has hardened into an in-itself — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 434; Only the for-itself has a past, the in-itself does not. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 422 (+11 more)
- DEEPTHINKING: The claim that there is ‘not first one universal time where a For-itself suddenly appears’ — time itself is retroactively constituted by the upsurge of consciousness — is a top-tier ontological insight.
- SEED: Angle for an essay: what it would mean if consciousness retroactively constituted its own causal past — a reading of freedom that turns genealogy on its head.
Broader Connections
- Only the for-itself has a past, the in-itself does not.
#expands(0.90) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 422 - The for-itself is its past yet cannot posit or thematize it
#qualifies(0.85) - The past is not an accretion but a necessary structural feature of the For-itself.
#expands(0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 476 - Present experience re-encounters a past that was once a projected future.
#expands(0.80) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1068